Alex Bau

Alex Bau Biography

There are not many DJ`s of this type. DJ`s who believed in Techno from the first minute, DJ`s who experienced Techno from the very beginning, DJ`s who made techno their own thing. DJ`s who found their own style, even more, who developped it over the years, Dj`s who`s name is the expression for a specific sound. Alex Bau is one of them. But at the same time, there are some slight differences with this guy. Why focussing on just one style of music? Why only minimal sounds? Why only Techno? Why? If cou can have both…

Is it related to the fact that there has been a time before Techno for Alex Bau? Thousands of records in his collection, different styles, different music, for sure something that leaves its marks, no doubt about it. Still he is doing Depeche Mode-Nights from time to time, just for fun, and his activities on Techno doesn`t really suffer from that, not at all! With his 5 or even more hours sets at his first resident club in his southeastbavarian homearea, the „Libella“, where for example also DJ Hell started his career back in the 80ies, he achieved the reputation as somebody who is totally aware of what he is doing, totally dedicated to it and also totally loving it. He had his own radioshow for over 2 years on a local radiostation, still so far the only technoshow in this area, but after countless gigs at the local clubs time was right to proof that he is also able to play at other places all around. Especially the productions together with his friend Sven Dedek, mainly released under their moniker „Basic Implant“ or „Electric Envoy“ on labels like the at this time starting „Fine Audio Recordings“ from Chris Liebing have hit the technofloors in a very impressive way, so that he was able to collect also international experiences behind the decks while Sven was playing live. Releases like the „Phase Edit EP“, a highly acclaimed and well sold rework of some Nitzer Ebb EBM Classics, or their work for Dave Angel`s "Rotation", Justin Berkovi`s "Predicaments" or Pascal FEOS` "PV-Records" enabled the guys to reach a much bigger audience. Finally, after numerous releases for different labels beside his own label “Toneman”, Alex released his debut-album “Connected” in late 2004, which immediately draw the attention of many high class DJ`s like Chris Liebing, Pascal FEOS or Good Groove to name just a few. The fact that these artists, all standing for a different kind of style, grabbed the tracks from “Connected” constantly shows that the name of the album couldn`t have been chosen in a better way.

With starting his own label „Toneman“ back in 2000 Alex Bau also started to his soloproductions for labels like Chris Liebing`s “CLR” or the Montreal based label "Default Recordings". Montreal can be understood as a kind of scale of Alex` DJ-activities too! Within 3 years he has been booked to Montreal four times, his set from the legendary night at “Aria” from january 2006 was even released as a mix-cd “live at Aria / Montreal” so that Alex came back months later to perform on the releaseparty, once again a night to remember for the Montreal technomovement. At this time Alex was already booked as the headliner, and its reported by numerous mails and guestbook-entries that it was not a mistake to do so. Maybe also as a small, unconscious “thank you”, but mainly due to a very inspirational night he spent in Halifax, where he flew over to Canada for just one night, he declared an EP as the “C.A.N.A.D.A. EP”, which was released on CLR in late 2007 and received overwhelming feedback from all over the globe. People desrcibed the tracks “Summer in Moncton” and “Halifax Funk” as masterpieces of contemporary technomusic which seperates positively from the rest, mainly dominated by minimal clicks and cuts.

But it`s not only Montreal, where Alex is being booked again and again, there are also other places, which obviously is a sign that he seems to be a guy who understands what to do when standing in front of people and trying to bring the party to the max. Clubs like Frankfurt`s "U60311", where, among other dates, he was part of the closing night of Chris Liebing`s legendary partyseries “Es ist Freitagaaabend”, Munich`s "Electric Delicate", Würzburg`s "Airport", or the legendary "Tresor" in Berlin are not only the trademarks of german technoclubculture, they can also be found on Alex Bau`s giglist. Japan, Braszil, USA, Canada, Poland, Croatia, Serbia, Holland or the closer Austria and Switzerland are some of the tourstops on Alex` calender, and no matter where, all over the places people can hear and feel how interesting, versatile and powerful techno can be if you understand to combine minimal and straight techno as a constant up and down. Always everything under control while the party is going wild, that`s what Alex is always going for. That`s also something what the crowd seemed to have experienced, so that Alex was voted among the 20 best national DJ`s on the poll from Germany`s leading Dancemagazine, Raveline, in 2006.

After a short intermezzo as an official artist on the highly acclaimed label „Zenit“, that has been the platform for acts like Marco Carola, Adam Beyer, The Advent, Gaetano Parisio and many more, he now puts the focus back again on an own platform after releasing his album „Credo“ as a sublabel from Zenit, which is now “continued” as his personal artist label with already highly acclaimed releases like “My bleepy helloween” or “Bullet in your heart”, minimal tunes go together with peaktime slammers in a way that appears obvious and logic. This fact and the music on “Credo” attracts a lot of leading colleagues of Alex like Chris Liebing, Dubfire, Adam Beyer, Stephan Bodzin or also Charles Siegling aka Technasia, who invited Alex to join the worldfamous Sino-Label by end of 2008. The feedback on Alex` music is growing constantly, he turned out to be one the few real technoproducers since 2008 and his decision to focus on only a few, but very powerful and strong releases on labels like CLR, Sino or Credo speaks for itself. After releasing numerous succesful releases and remixes in 2009, e.g. “Red Chromosome” on CLR or the “Dark Summer Nights” on Credo, which has to be repressed again and again and was even featured on the German Club Charts (DDC), Alex was really touched by the fact that one of his musical idols, Martin L. Gore, has picked a remix from him (Marko`s “Everything turns black” Remix by Alex) for his pre-show-dj-set of the worldwide Depeche Mode “Tour of the Universe”. 2010 will not only see Alex being a part of handful of high-class artists to create the “10 years CLR compilation”, it will also be the year of Alex` next album “Being Wayne Sidorsky”, an outstanding album and